Climate change, getting our boots on …

BPSDB “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on…”

The past few years have seen the internet change fairly significantly with respect to the issue of climate change. As a tool for public education the internet is invaluable. Unfortunately as a tool for disinformation it seems that it is even more effective.

To what extent disinformation on the net drives climate change Denial as opposed to the reverse is a chicken and egg discussion. Undoubtedly they feed on each other in a classic positive feedback loop. The question is, what is to be done about it.

Not that any one thing is going to turn it around. There are a host of things the climate science community needs to do. However, I do have one specific proposal that I believe would be helpful and I would like some feedback on it.

Before getting to the proposal I want to look at some of the changes to outline my reasoning. Probably the main thing is that where once there were a limited number of sites and blogs about climate there are now many thousands. Coupled with that is that there is also much more information available on the net.

Even without the Denialosphere muddying the waters it can be very difficult to find what you are looking for unless you already know enough details to do a very specific search.

To the naive user it must seem completely overwhelming. Certainly the challenge of finding a good refutation of a specific Denier meme must defeat many internet users who are not aware of Skeptical Science and similar resources.

There are two large groups of web users that this is a significant problem for. The first are those who encounter some Denier meme on a forum or similar web space (eg Yahoo Answers). They want to reply to it with something factual and rational, but do not have the experience, motivation, time, or perhaps the even skills to track it down.

If they can’t find an answer quickly they will give up in frustration and we will collectively have missed yet another opportunity to combat disinformation (not to mention left someone feeling frustrated and disenchanted when they might have been empowered).

Another large group are the ones looking for an answer not for the purpose of learning it or even to use in reply to some Denier that they have engaged, but simply to be assured that it exists. They merely want to know that there is a rational, fact based explanation for whatever issue they are puzzled by. What it is does not even particularly concern them, they just want to see that there is one.

Typical internet users are not the only ones having difficulty, there is also the average journalist. Journalists who are not doing the climate story on an ongoing basis rarely have the luxury of sufficient time to ‘get it right.’ They will go with whatever seemingly acceptable sources they first encounter because they are typically under the gun.

Two other changes in the internet that stand out as significant would include:

Denier memes turn over very quickly. The meme de jour used to last one or two weeks, now it is one or two days before it is replaced by the next one.

It seems to me that one of the things we need is a central hub that is in effect a directory to good, reliable, science based information.

Further, the hub should also track current Denier memes so that as soon as a fact based refutation is identified it can be broadcast to the wider community. In that way it would also act as a rapid response hub to provide reliable counters to the flood of disinformation.

I am not talking about a site with content, but rather one that helps people navigate quickly to the information that already exists and continues to accumulate. A hub that sorts, categorizes and catalogues what is already out there.

This is in no way meant to replace any of the existing resources, but rather to help people find the right resources quickly and easily. Part of that includes categorizing sources so that people can find material that is appropriate for them.

For example, Open Mind and Realclimate (to name just two) are awesome, but they are not for the average internet user. The site should include a broad range of sources that vary in depth and assumed familiarity with climate issues. Hopefully this would also generate more visibility for the many excellent, but relatively unknown resources that are out there.

So far I have focused on the aspect of the science and responding to the disinformation, but ideally the site would cover other aspects of climate as well, from policy to ethics to innovations and solutions. A section dedicated strictly to the all too rare good news would not be amiss either.

Having said that, it would need to be staffed, and I think it would need to be a restricted wiki.

The sheer volume of material is so large that nothing short of a community effort will suffice to handle what is being generated every day, never mind everything that already exists.

Restricted access for the obvious reason that an open wiki will get spammed to death by the trolls.

Further, without at least one person coordinating it full time I just don’t see it as possible. To be useful it must be consistent and current. Individuals contributors will come and go, but someone dedicated full time can keep the momentum going and recruit new participants.

I say a staff person for the sake of continuity. There are any number of examples of stellar achievements done by people who are dedicating heart and soul to a project on a volunteer basis. Unfortunately the moment they are lost for whatever reason, be it loss of interest or energy, health, or life circumstance, the project is dead.

For the same reason it would be best if it were a cooperative effort between a number of organizations. In that way it would not be a significant burden on any one, and also not as vulnerable to the vagaries of changing issue and funding priorities. It would also help to deflect the perception of partisanship.

So that is the proposal. In essence a climate dedicated wiki that is a cataloguing and navigational hub rather than a source of content. Something that in time would become “The Place” to look to find everything else.

So what do people think? I am seriously looking for input here, so please let fly!

25 Responses

They’ve been amazingly successful in combating creationism.
The very problems and technical issues you describe are pretty much the same that were faced by individual, isolated science defenders back in the 70’s and 80’s squaring off against the multi-headed hydra of creation “science”.

Co-ordination amongst the talent that already exists to create the climate science version of the NCSE would be da bomb!
Learn from their hard-won experience.
They have already blazed the trail.They themselves see the potential.

Lots of people seem to be working on parts of this problem, getting people to work together will be some work. Skeptical Science has been having users submit all kinds of data like links to examples of common denier claims; this sort of thing would make great data to apply machine learning techniques and detect trends in claims, or to simply create a “Climate BS Detector” which you could simply copy an article or blog post/comment into and get a list of links to rebuttals of claims it seems to make. I had to write a spam filter for a machine learning class; this wouldn’t be that different and I’d be curious to try some time if enough data could be put together.

One thing you don’t want to do is write a search engine. But you can get other engines to do this work. I typed “Antarctic ice is growing site:skepticalscience.com OR site:scienceblogs.com” into Google and multi-site search works okay (this works in Bing too though there you have to put parentheses around the list of sites) so you could pretty easily create a Search box that searched a long list of sites, or choose one of a set of lists to search, i.e. sites targeted toward laymen, sites targeted to more technical, peer reviewed literature, official sites (IPCC, NOAA, Met Office).

One problem with it though is that I don’t know how to get it to order the results chronologically.
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THe spam filter tagged your first one … I would have released it as soon as I checked.

Yes, I use google custom search, but I am not thinking search engine at all. Really a catalogue where you could find Monckton, or snow meme, or info on CO2 sensitivity. Really a sorted links collection.

Sure, you can use custom search and I was able to figure out how to enter the string above, but that’s a lot for most users. And a heirarchical list is a valid way of organizing information but a lot of the time search is going to be easier so as long as you’re building a database of resources you might as well have a search over those resources; it shouldn’t be difficult to implement.

If you’re building more than “another Skeptical Science or RC Wiki, only different” one approach you might take is to build tools others can easily integrate into their sites, and also make integration of other sites into yours as automatic as possible. If climate bloggers on your list of resources can add metadata to their posts that causes them to automatically enter your database without logging into your site, you may find it much easier to build it.

I don’t know exactly what you have in mind but if you have any use for a programmer I may be able to volunteer a little time.

Eric L, sounds like you’re thinking of something like the AGW bot, but applied to sentences in inactivist blog posts. It may be fruitful to find out what training data and techniques it’s using (I haven’t yet tried).

Such a ‘climate bogonews filter’ will certainly relieve a lot of the burden of watching for the latest rehash of some tired old talking point — at least until the inactivist bloggers figure out how to game the filter. The only problem is that it requires a good deal of initial effort to train up such the system.

Doesn’t RealClimate itself already have a wiki? What do you see as the problems with the RealClimate wiki?
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No issues with the RC wiki for what it is, and this would most definitely point to it as one of the good resources, however:

– it is very narrowly focused on debunking Deniers, this is meant to be broader
– the emphasis is on more high end material, I am thinking of including material that is more accessible to the general public;
– the RCwiki response time is fairly slow, granted Denier memes live forever, but we need something with more rapid response;
– The RC folks themselves are already working their brains out, so no one is really in a position to give the RCwiki more attention

I suspect that more than half of the psuedo-science items being posted by anti-AGW bloggers on comment threads are cut & paste from Wattsupwiththat.

Given the excellent tracking of Wattsupwiththat posts by Ben of Wott’s up with That, perhaps Ben and John cook could collaborate on developing a system whereby Ben’s posts proved direct links to specific rebuttals on the Skeptical Science website.

“TRACK CURRENT DENIER MEMES”……….is the aspect of your proposal that I would like to (unfairly) address. By stressing your call for immediacy, and by refocusing some of your volunteer’s efforts, and by calling your memes ‘OUTPUT'; I can promise significant analysis help, and other good things, from the INPUT side.

INPUT……….The most obvious rapid response would be from a one-to-one, blogpost by blogpost, parallel-to-WUWT website, that posts bare-WUWT-titles as (place holding) articles, as soon as they become available.

This would be an immediately available TIP Line, for every ‘knowledgable person’ who recognizes what went wrong in the WUWT blogpost. It might benefit from some of the same motivation behind answering journalist’s questions at UCS, CCRT and AGU Q&A. Also, an obvious place for reference links, starting with Wikipedia and Skeptical Science, by title.

With prompt moderation, these become readily available in the comments for use by anyone posting here, or over there. When convenient, the best stuff can be repeated up above. During, or afterwards, a guest post can be added above.

Links are added when other websites also address the same WUWT article.

So, much of the work will already have been done, when a particular blogpost is declared a new denier meme. And, note that if the meme’s First Draft becomes a comment in the same thread, that it may generate some responses from people who wouldn’t otherwise see it.

The big problem that I see is that often the memes or false positions are “halfway around the world” before any answer is available.

I don’t see an answer to that. As a non scientist, I spend probably a couple of hours a day looking for answers to many pieces of disinformation, including those on Wattsup that are mirrored on forums and blogs around the world within minutes of their appearance.

Sometimes, it is several days before a rebuttal appears anywhere. Ben at Wottsup does a good job but not in time for the thousands of faithful deniers to have, and spread, reinforcement.

I suspect that the text of this editorial was drafted by the Anti-AGW Spin Machine and has been distributed to media outlets throughout the US. I also suspect that the call for a “neutral commission” will soon become a mantra of the Republican/Tea Party strategy to further muddy the scientific waters.

Good grief, it’s FILLED with questionable and false claims! It’s actually a Gish gallop of false/erroneous statements, so any rebuttal can be expected to be followed by another Gish gallop, without acknowledging the original piece was wrong…

The “climate bogonews filter” Frank suggested above sounds like a great idea. An initial verson might be be so difficult to get going if it simply worked from key words or terms rather than more complex phrases, e.g. if solar or Sun appeared in the piece, that word would highlight and with a click show a drop-down menu of articles (on the existing sites) countering the various denier solar arguments. These could be identified by short descriptive phrases rated according to degree of technicality, and the details would be a click away. I assume it wouldn’t be too hard to provide for a degree of feedback. It could be fancied up later on. Some connectivity to the CSRRT would make sense. An obvious objective would be to get it to show well in the search engines.

I was just listening to a recent This American Life segment (starts 24:45 in) someone linked at Shewonk’s, which featured a scientist trying to convince a denialist teenager about AGW. The scientist works out of NCAR and is the executive director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and from the sound of it she might be very interested in something like this.

I’d be willing to put some time into helping, although I have no special expertise.

“Singing in the Rain” is an e-letter from James Hansen, who describes it as:

“A discussion in response to a spate of nasty angry messages, aimed at keeping the focus where I think it belongs, on the inter-generational unfairness of not dealing with human-made climate change. ~Jim”